[WISH] Differenciated typo for optional inputs.

Hi David,

I would have a little suggestion to improve a bit the readability of big components with a lot of inputs (sometimes it's not possible to split that much...):

would it be possible to have a different typo for regular and optional inputs?

For exemple, bold for regular one, italic for optional?

Or at least, if it is something that does not seem to be appropriate for all the components, would it be possible to have a custom font style attribute for the inputs?

Have a nice day,

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on August 1, 2013 at 4:19pm

Hi Thibault,

Is this a major source of confusion? People who don't know how a component works presumably use the tooltips to examine the input parameters. If the tooltips already indicate optionality, is it necessary to also display that property using different fonts/colours?

Don't get me wrong, it's not a bad idea at all to show the difference between optional and required parameter, I'm just wondering if this is a solution to an actual problem.

David Rutten

david@mcneel.com

Tirol, Austria

Permalink Reply by Thibault Schwartz on August 1, 2013 at 4:44pm

Hi David, thanks for your quick answer.

For the moment I am putting a big "OPTIONAL // " prefix in the tooltip as you were mentioning, but when you have a component with 20+ inputs with different levels of access and sometimes different ways to compute, it begins to be quite confusing.

A simple exemple: let's say I have a component that can work the same way with different sets of inputs. I can have a few inputs that never change, since they are always required in all methods. Then I usually put a "Method" or "Mode" integer value, where you can choose the kind of set to listen to. Then I have all the inputs that may be used for the sets, and of course they are not always optional anymore when the "Method" input changes. It's quite useful to do all-in-one components (taking less space in the toolbars, even more when the toolbar is already full).

Dumb exemple:

//SURVIVAL IN LONDON//

Name: Your name

Difficulty: 0=Easy, 1=Medium, 2=Hard.

EasyOption: OPTIONAL // If you are in Easy mode, are you afraid of burgers?

MediumOption: OPTIONAL // If you are in Medium mode, are you afraid of kebabs?

HardOption: OPTIONAL // If you are in Hard mode, are you afraid of chicken katsu?

Of course the list of option here is simple, but it often gets messy with some "If you are in Easy or Hard Mode and your name becomes by a T then this input works with another one" kind of things, etc.

At the end, anybody who wants to use the component just takes a huge thing on the canvas with so many inputs that they don't even want to understand the tooltips anymore.

So I was thinking that maybe it would be useful to have some font style to help a bit. If they can be associated and updated with other things (the "Mode" switch thing) then it's even better, but just simple optional / not optional stuff would already be really helpful I suppose.

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